by Jerramy Fine
I looked across the room at the two toga-clad boys and sighed happily. They were just as good-looking and half-naked as any of the others. Suddenly, Giles caught me looking at him.
Oh my God. He winked at me!
This was my chance.
I looked right back into that future lord’s gorgeous aristocratic eyes and gave him a demure smile. Then I gracefully went upstairs to fasten the leaves more tightly into my hair.
To make a long story short, Giles followed me. And before I knew what was happening, we were in someone’s bedroom ravishing each other. This is the problem with being drunk. I was drunk on a toga party full of British Greek gods, and I was most definitely drunk on eight cups of sangria. I didn’t exactly stop to analyze that ripping off togas in such a hasty manner was perhaps not the best way to behave with a future lord. I was too caught up in the glorious idea that I was actually kissing a future lord. So caught up, in fact, that I didn’t realize that the toga party had become so crowded that it had pushed its way upstairs and into the very bedroom where the ravishing was taking place.
Suddenly, fifteen or twenty people wearing togas realized they had interrupted two people who were not wearing togas. Luckily, I was too drunk to be embarrassed about it. I quickly put my pillowcase toga back on, reapplied my lipstick in the bathroom mirror, and reentered the party as if nothing had happened.
See? I was fitting into British aristocratic life just fine.
Ten
“Good party behavior is a breeze for the well-mannered guest.”
—Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners
When I came to my senses—or more accurately, when I sobered up—I wondered if, after the toga incident, I would be able to show my face in English society ever again. I asked Rupert about it and he told me I was overreacting. But Rupert’s a guy. Guys always think girls are overreacting.
Despite these worries, I somehow managed to block the scandal between his future lordship and me out of my mind and continued to take the double-decker bus from Victoria Station to Oxford every weekend that I could.36 I felt slightly guilty about neglecting my lengthy reading lists and tedious seminars at LSE, but a girl’s got to think of her royal future.
Before I left Colorado and went off to college, I had tried to host a black-tie summer dinner party to say farewell to all my friends in high school. Held in my backyard, I’d designed the invitations, wrote out the place cards with fake aristocratic titles, bought elegant floral centerpieces and linen napkins, strung fairy lights through trees, assembled scores of delicate canapés, and cooked an elaborate five-course menu for twenty. I’d even hired my thirteen-year-old brother and his skater-punk friends to be “my staff” and made them wear matching outfits. I had brandy and cigars for the boys, and parlor games ready for the girls. I’d done everything in my power to create the façade of a formal turn-of the-century English country house–style affair, and everything in my power to make myself forget, if only for an evening, that I lived thousands of miles away from England and a mere mile away from a Super Wal-Mart.
But less than an hour into the party, couples were making out on the lawn, guests were climbing the fairy-light trees in such large numbers that a branch broke and fell onto the dining table, someone had stuck their entire hand into the center of my beautifully crafted chocolate-raspberry torte, and my staff were so stoned that they were hanging out with Jasper in his dog house. Everyone was ignoring my seating chart and the order of the courses and pretty much treated the entire event like any other high-school beer fest—except they were wearing old prom attire instead of khaki shorts and drinking my specially mixed cocktails instead of cans of Bud Light.
This was only my first month or so of drinking (I had decided to start practicing before college), and I wasn’t used to the exaggerated effects alcohol had on my emotions. And when I saw my elegant chocolate-raspberry torte being devoured by the handful, I lost it. Stumbling over the hem of my red velvet evening dress, I ran toward the tipi in fits of tears as my perfect party crumbled around me.
I remember that Mike, who was forever begging his provincial buddies to “give the three-piece suit a chance,” was the only one that followed me. He appreciated what I was trying to create.
“Don’t worry, Countess,” he soothed as he sipped cognac from his hip flask. “Someday you’ll find the civilized debauchery you’re looking for.”
He was right.
Unlike most English people I would later meet, Rupert’s clique of friends seemed to grasp that being American wasn’t entirely my fault, merely my misfortune. And in retrospect, welcoming me into their social circle was probably an act of charity as much as anything else, but I was having way too much fun to dwell on it.
Rupert’s crowd all looked and sounded and acted exactly the same. Same accents (upper-class), same fashion sense (the more sloppy and disheveled you looked, the more money you had), same skin (glowingly and annoyingly clear). Keen to be surrounded by guys and girls that spoke and lived exactly as they did, they’d found each other quite quickly once university began and, for the most part, kept to themselves.
The more time I spent with them, the more I realized that it was precisely their extreme privilege, precisely their profound to the-manner-born self-assurance that had been ingrained in their DNA for centuries, that made them so utterly charming. And I found this inner contentment to be a sharp and refreshing contrast to the arrogance and smugness that existed in so many self-made or new-moneyed Americans.
Still, there were hints of class snobbery that were clearly here to stay. Gold signet rings bearing one’s family crest (worn on the pinky for both men and women) were de rigueur and overall, there seemed to be a fanatical preoccupation with genealogy. Unlike the American mind-set, which is primarily about what you can one day become, for these kids the focus seemed to be much more about what you had been—your family’s history, your ancestor’s achievements, and so on.
They wouldn’t be caught dead at the student union or larger university parties—darling, those were for the masses, the plebs, the rough working class. (Meaning, those were for the bulk of British students37 that hadn’t attended a private school and didn’t speak with perfect BBC English.38) Instead, their social life consisted mainly of getting obliterated at each other’s houses or dinner parties, and occasionally crashing the local bars and nightclubs.
And then there was me, the token foreigner, who by some cosmic miracle was along for the ride.
Upon first meeting me, relatively sober English conversations always began with the most important things: where one lives, the people at the party one knows, where one went to boarding school, and one’s family background. I couldn’t exactly say, “A bomb shelter, no one but Rupert, an American public school full of hillbillies, and was practically raised in a tipi.” But luckily, in England you can pretty much get away with talking about nothing but the weather for the rest of your life and still pass as unbelievably witty and well mannered.
New conversations with more intoxicated English people were easier; they simply assumed I wouldn’t be at the party in the first place if I weren’t a suitable, well-connected, and established guest and therefore moved immediately to more trivial and flirtatious small talk.
It was here that I learned the value of exclamatory exaggeration: the choice of wine is simply brilliant, riveting, divine; a broken toaster is ghastly, beastly, God has struck!
And it was here that I learned the importance of understatement: Hurricanes? Middle Eastern conflicts? (“Darling, how terribly boring!”) Traffic accidents? Broken bones? (“A bit of a bother.”)
Both boys and girls seemed to constantly have their arms around each other, were forever kissing each other on both cheeks, and seemed to talk quite openly about almost any subject you can think of. Considering they’d all attended single-sex boarding schools for most for their lives, and university was truly their first time living in mixed company, I was rather taken aback to see that their se
xual maturity (at least on a social level) greatly surpassed that of American students of the same age. Their parties and dinner parties weren’t full of the juvenile fraternity/sorority antics I was used to; these bashes were straight out of Oscar Wilde. As young twentysomethings, they seemed to be in total denial that they were living on the cusp of a new millennium, and coped by pretending to be mini nineteenth-century adults. Bearing in mind that I’ve always pretended to be exactly the same thing, I loved every second of it.
I have to say being the only American in the room was wonderful—it brought me tons of male attention and I basked in it. But there were other times when my very novelty only served to remind me of how different I was from them, and how far I still had to go if I really wanted to blend in. My slightly “wild” London life spiced up their dinner parties (“Can you believe the poor girl lives in town?”) and perhaps added a touch of mystery or cosmopolitanism to their evenings, but I often wondered if they kept me around in the same way that they might keep an interesting pet.
I once read a hilarious article39 about student binge drinking and how it was considered a huge problem among U.S. universities, but oddly, not a problem at all in the U.K. The author, intrigued by the anomaly, had looked into how the U.S. and U.K. officially defined student “binge drinking” and unearthed some very entertaining results: Whereas the puritanical Americans defined binge drinking as “five beers in one sitting for a male, or four for a female,” the forever-jovial Brits defined the problem as “an extended period of time, lasting at least two days, during which a student repeatedly becomes intoxicated and gives up his or her usual activities and obligations in order to become intoxicated.”
Don’t get me wrong—I love my cocktails more than anyone, but I also thought part of being a student meant attending the occasional class and setting aside the occasional time to study and I found it rather bizarre that none of Rupert’s friends appeared to do either. Their “extended period of intoxication” seemed to be lasting all year.
(Actually, I take that back. Now that I think about it, I did witness Rupert and a few of his mates going over their Spanish in a pub one Sunday afternoon. But they were “studying” while drinking pints of beer and watching a rugby match on TV so it hardly counted.)
Needless to say, I was shocked by this British disregard for academics—particularly when I thought back to how much time I spent studying at Rochester. There, everyone around me studied for several hours in the library every single day. Even on weekends.
Were Rupert’s friends simply much smarter than me? So much so that they never needed to study? I have to say that for some reason I highly doubted that. Rupert’s friends may have been witty raconteurs, but they were hardly closet geniuses.
One day, when I randomly mentioned to Rupert’s friend Hugo how my friends in America were killing themselves to get into the top five business schools in the country, he looked horrified.
“You can’t be serious,” he said. “Surely getting an M.B.A. is because one wants to play golf on the roof of a frat house, or meet a ravishing young oil heiress. You don’t mean to tell me that your American friends, as charming as I’m sure they are, are competing purely for academic standing! Personally, I can’t think of anything worse than being cooped up for two years in the MIT library. To think nothing of the damage it would do to one’s CV.”40
Again, I was genuinely puzzled by this response. Not caring if I momentarily came across as an ignorant American, I asked Hugo to explain further.
“To put it bluntly, my dear,” he continued patiently, “in this country, it’s considered bad manners to be clever. It implies that your family’s history and status aren’t enough to get you by in life. Everyone knows only the lower classes feel the need to show off their academic prowess.”
Guess I’ll keep that LSE scholarship to myself then.
Now that every weekend I was immersed in English society, I was terrified of wearing the right clothes in the wrong combination, or using the right words in the wrong context. You must say sitting room, not living room; sofa, not couch; loo, not toilet. The list of unwritten rules was endless, and the smallest blunders on my part (apparently you must say, “what a lovely house,” and never say, “what a lovely home”) would occasionally cause a flurry of barely concealed shudders among my new friends.
English etiquette, especially among the upper-class characters I was mixing with, was a minefield—and I wanted to get it right. If my hippie parents wouldn’t send me to Swiss finishing school to learn such things (and with no Professor Higgins begging to tutor me like in My Fair Lady), by God, I would teach myself!
As part of my self-taught assimilation course, I decided to read Debrett’s41New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners cover to cover. Emily Post may have been the goddess of American etiquette, but Debrett’s was the only true authority on proper English behavior and I was determined to encapsulate all of its wise teachings.
Table manners were the real test. (I’ve actually met an English girl that stopped dating an English guy because he neglected to hold his knife correctly.) But I knew most things already: bread plate on your left, wine and water on your right, spoon your soup away from you, tilt your bowl away from you, fill others’ glasses before you fill your own, place your knife and fork side by side on the plate when finished eating, and so on. This stuff was easy, mainly because it’s also considered correct form in America.
Not that anyone in my little Colorado town realized this. After driving thirty miles to the nearest fine dining establishment for my much anticipated prom night dinner, I can’t tell you the horror that welled up inside me when my date proceeded to use my bread plate throughout the entire meal and then casually tossed his cutlery on the table when he was finished. And I’d thought I’d bagged one of the more refined guys in town!
And I already knew (or thought I knew) the basics of English eating etiquette: fork in your left hand, knife in your right (never switch hands), always eat with your fork upside down (never use it to scoop), never cut things with the side of your fork, and so on.
But then there were several English rules that were entirely new to me, and I have to say, when I read about them, their arcane absurdity astounded me. From what I could tell, dozens of invisible, nonfunctional rules existed purely to ostracize those that knew them from those that didn’t. (And to allow those in the know to tell terribly amusing anecdotes about those who weren’t.)
For example, port must always be passed clockwise. You don’t talk about it. It just happens. And if I hadn’t happened to read about this universal beverage traffic law the night before, the port’s journey would have stopped with me and everyone would have enjoyed being silently aghast at my American ignorance and talked excitedly about the incident among themselves for weeks to come.
Then there’s the monstrous challenge of correctly eating something as simple as peas. According to Debrett’s, the “correct way to consume peas is to squash them on top of the fork.” By this they mean using your knife (held in your right hand) to smash the peas violently against the back of your fork (which you are holding in your left hand with the prongs facing down) until they are sufficiently mushy and secure, after which it is safe to bring the fork to your mouth. No piercing of peas is permitted; no scooping of peas is permitted. And under no circumstances are you to turn the fork over and push the peas onto the inside of the fork with your knife. That would be far too easy. And far too working-class.
Sure, I should’ve been reading my criminal rehabilitation textbook cover to cover instead of attempting to teach myself how to correctly peel an orange with a knife and fork (I dare you to try it), but again, I had a strange sense that mastering Debrett’s would do more for my future than debating the pros and cons of the prison system. (Not that I didn’t care deeply about reforming the prison system.)
Of course everybody in Oxford was blissfully ignorant when it came to my hippie upbringing, and my ongoing regime to mold myself into the perfect royal
consort seemed to be working—aside from the small fact that I was still looking for the royal in question. But I remained patient; Peter wasn’t going anywhere and my skills still required much honing. And in the meantime, I would continue to test them on Rupert’s friends.
“Jerramy, you are the only American I’m actually fond of” was a comment I heard often, and it was music to my ears.
And when someone told me, “Jerramy, you are the only American I know that has true class,” I knew things were going very well indeed.
My farm town existence was receding rapidly into oblivion. I was a long, long way from the Hog Back.
Professor Higgins would have been very proud.
Eleven
“I am happy that George calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As is, I now endure but two calls a week, and when I hear his steps outside my door, I lie back on my bed, close my eyes and think of England.”
—LADY ALICE HILLINGDON, WIFE OF 2ND BARON HILLINGDON, 1912
Although these Oxford guys may have looked and sounded like Hugh Grant at his sexiest, their behavior was nothing like the shy, dithering stereo type that Hollywood so sweetly portrayed. While in most of his movies, Hugh Grant can barely glance at a girl without stammering and turning bright red, Rupert’s foppish friends were unbelievably confident, assertive, and gregarious—especially with the opposite sex. When it came to their dealings with girls (or at least when it came to their dealings with me) their elegant charm was as enticing as their staggering audacity. It was pure James Bond–style impudence (cut-glass accent included), and I found it irresistible.